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The Music & Arts Library and the Sound Arts MFA Program cordially invite you to “A Not So Quiet Space”, featuring work by the current students in the program, utilizing the space of the Music & Arts Library for temporary installations and performances.

Come join us for some interesting sounds and experiences!
Friday, 10/21, from 6-8pm, in the Music & Arts Library, 701 Dodge.
(CUID required or contact patterson@columbia.edu to RSVP).

Over the last few months, the video editing facilities at the Digital Humanities Center (DHC) have had a major makeover. The older machines in that room have been replaced by 8 dual screen iMac computers, with a new suite of software on the machines. We now support three editing softwares: Adobe Premiere (along with a full suite of Creative Cloud tools), Avid, and, FinalCut7.

The staff of the center includes graduate students in the Film Division of the School of the Arts, who can provide assistance with many video editing needs.
The environment also enhances our ability to support a variety of other Mac softwares: DevonThink, Sente, NVivo, and Filemaker Pro.

The layout of the room and a ceiling projector also make this available as an instructional space for small groups. The DHC will be offering some video editing, NVivo, and DevonThink workshops here later in this semester, and we are happy to reserve the room for other small groups wanting to organize technology workshops.

In honor of this milestone, I have purposely selected the Criterion Blu-ray release of The Night of the Hunter to receive call number DVD30000.

Originally released in 1955 and directed by Charles Laughton, the film tells the story of a demented murderous preacher named Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) who decides it is his calling to kill widows for their money. After a stint in jail for stealing a car, he learns of a bank robbery gone bad. The robber, Ben Harper (Peter Graves), injured and on the run, decides to hide the money. He asks that his two young children never reveal where he hid the stash. Harper is taken away and hanged, leaving behind his two young children and wife, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters). Preacher Powell makes his move once he is released from jail in pursuit of the widow and the money. On his right hand, he has tattooed “LOVE” and on his left, “HATE.” As he makes acquaintance with Willa and the children, Harper’s young boy takes notice of the tattoos. The Preacher begins to stalk the children because he believes they know where their late bank-robbing father hid the money he collected. The children don’t trust the preacher and soon understand what he is after. Willa does not and buys his con game and marries him. She is soon dead. In one of the most incredible shots in the film, she is seen at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river. The children flee and the Preacher is in pursuit. The children find refuge and protection with Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), a Bible-fearing elderly woman from the town.

The film opens with a dramatic reading from the Bible by Rachel Cooper in which she warns the children “to beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” (King James Version of the Bible Matthew 7:15). She continues, “ye shall know them by their fruits.”

This was an important role for Lillian Gish who last appeared in a film in 1949 before signing on to The Night of the Hunter. Other actresses had been considered for the role of Rachel, including Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Agnes Moorehead, and Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s wife.

The filmmakers were sensitive to the censors and religious groups. They worked to make sure not to give the impression that the Preacher was an ordained minister. James Agee is credited with the screenplay. Laughton also worked with Davis Grubb on character and plot points. Grubb wrote the book of the same title (NY, 1953) on which the screenplay is based.

Since its release, the film has earned critical acclaim and a faithful following. But the film was not a financial success during its theatrical release making it difficult for Laughton to be considered for future projects. This was his first and last film as director. He continued to act in feature films following The Night of the Hunter delivering memorable performances in Witness for the Prosecution, Spartacus, Advise and Consent, and Galileo.

In later appreciations, Rogert Ebert called The Night of the Hunter one of the greatest of all American films. He noted it never received the attention it deserved. A.O. Scott, film critic for the New York Times, looked back on the film several years ago and described it as “a hybrid of a folk tale and a film noir, but true to its own vivid and haunting reality.”

The film had its World Premiere in Des Moines, Illinois on July 26, 1955, and opened in New York on September 29, 1955.

In 1992, the film was added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

The Criterion Blu-ray includes a number of interesting special features. A short film entitled The Making of The Night of the Hunter, Simon Callow on Charles Laughton, and an excerpt from the Ed Sullivan Show (September 25, 1955 episode) in which cast members perform a deleted scene. There are also hours of outtakes and behind the scenes footage.

Other Butler Media milestones…

Man With a Movie Camera (1929)– DVD001

Cleopatra (1963)– DVD10000

Without Reservations (1946) — DVD20000

The Night of the Hunter, DVD30000, is available from the Butler Media Research Collection located in Butler Reserves, 208 Butler.

The researcher follows many paths in search of scholarly information — chasing down specific items recommended by colleagues using CLIO and the Catalog, using the same tools to follow the footnotes and delve into an author’s sources, searching in Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, or collections of online full text to follow the footnotes “forward,” (i.e., to see who else has cited a work), or mining gateways like EbscoHost and Proquest or individual databases for their field to discover works that have been written on a particular topic. A less systematic, but often equally fruitful approach has long been serendipity, the chance identification of relevant or related material that frequently occurs when one is browsing a collection, say, while looking for a particular item on the shelves in the library stacks and notices another interesting title just a . In recent decades, with the movement of much material to offsite collections and the replacement of more and more print texts by online electronic ones, many scholars have lamented the declining opportunities for this kind of tangential discovery.

Happily, Columbia and other libraries have been circling back to a revival of this approach.

A wonderful, though still little known feature of our current online catalog is the option it provides for a Virtual Shelf Browse. When a full record is displayed on the bottom of the screen, the shelf browse option appears at the bottom of the page, and can be turned on by simply clicking a button. One can then browse back and forth along a virtual shelf that brings all of Columbia’s library departments together.

Browzine is a tool that seeks to enhance the declining opportunities for serendipity in our periodical reading rooms, as more and more titles become available in online format only. Browzine works with an impressive list of publishers to bring many (but far from all) of the journals in our collection into a library from which individual titles can be retrieved and browsed, starting with the most recent issue. Individual articles can be displayed on screen and then downloaded to one’s desktop or captured using a citation management software like Zotero.

After creating a user account (don’t use your Columbia password!), a reader can place the journals most likely to be consulted on a four personal bookshelves. An app for portable devices can also be downloaded, enabling users to sync to their online account and download and read articles there.

The number of publishers working with Browzine is growing. If there is a journal that you would like to see included here, feel free to contact us at rhs1@columbia.edu.

Many of us use the Borrow Direct service to get materials not available at Columbia University Libraries, but do you know about the Borrow Direct Plus On-Site Borrowing program? Through the Borrow Direct Plus On-Site Borrowing program, current Columbia, Barnard, Teachers College, and Union Theological Seminary faculty, staff, and students also have on-site library borrowing privileges at Borrow Direct libraries: Brown, University of Chicago, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Yale.

Review the hours, access information, and policies for an institution prior to your visit: Borrow Direct Plus On-Site Borrowing. When visiting one of these libraries, just show your Columbia ID. You’ll be asked to log into your Borrow Direct account to verify your eligibility. Once verified, you’ll get your library borrowing card.

The next time you visit one of these universities, visit its libraries and check out what you can borrow!

The Library has added three new databases to support LGBTQ studies at Columbia.

Archives of Human Sexuality: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 includes digitized archives of the New York Mattachine Society, the Gay Activists Alliance, and ACT UP from the New York Public Library; newsletters, feminist newspapers, and subject files from the Lesbian Herstory Archives; Daughters of Bilitis, homophile, and activism collections of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society in San Francisco; AIDS Crisis records from the National Library of Medicine; Hall-Carpenter Archives, London School of Economics; the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives; and several collections of LGBT magazines.

LGBT Thought and Culture

LGBT Thought and Culture includes manuscripts from the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, the Tracy Baim editorial files, the National Archives at Kew; and the Eros Foundation Archives. It also includes books: scholarly and popular history, fiction and cultural studies.

From Before Stonewall, LGBT Studies in Video

LGBT Studies in Video provides a cinematic survey of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as the cultural and political evolution of the LGBT community. This streaming collection features award-winning documentaries, interviews, archival footage, and select feature films exploring LGBT history, gay culture and subcultures, civil rights, marriage equality, LGBT families, AIDS, transgender issues, religious perspectives on homosexuality, global comparative experiences, and other topics. The database includes 370 videos, searchable transcripts, and name and subject indexing.

Other Library databases in LGBTQ studies include LGBT Life, an index of scholarly and popular periodicals from the mid-twentieth century to the present, Gender Studies Database, and Independent Voices, an open access collection of the alternative press with a number of LGBT titles, including a run of ONE from 1954 to 1973.

Please find below links to CLIO records for new databases related to the humanities and/or history acquired by Columbia University Libraries since our last newsletter was published (on March 1, 2016). For a fuller descriptive treatment of selected new databases, please see Featured Resources: New Databases in LGBTQ Studies.

The Hispanic Institute and Comics@Columbia are delighted to work with the Spanish consulate to present five noted Spanish cartoonists in conversation. Come meet these five cartoonists, whose work on the cutting edge of comics has brought about a new wave of cartoon art in Spain.

The panel will feature Santiago García, Javier Olivares, David Rubín, Ana Galvañ, and José Domingo, some of the many gifted artists featured in “Spanish Fever: Stories by the New Spanish Cartoonists” (Fantagraphics, 2016).

The discussion will be followed by a live drawing, as well as light refreshments.

Come join us in Butler Library, room 523.

Admission is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, but REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED!
Click this link to register: http://bit.ly/2caDJNN

As of July 5, 2016, our Western European Humanities Librarian, Meredith Levin, is the Interim Head of the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary for this academic year.

She is still reachable via email (mjl2209@columbia.edu) and in her office at Butler (309I) on Mondays and most Friday mornings but she will be at the Burke most other times (office on the 3rd floor, phone: 212-851-5611).

For reference questions or purchase recommendations related to Western European history, Scandinavian languages & literatures, or the history of science, please contact Ian Beilin (igb4@columbia.edu).

For reference questions or purchase recommendations related to French language & literature or comparative literature, please contact John Tofanelli (jt628@columbia.edu).

All Italian history, language & literature questions can still be directed to Meredith.

On behalf of the Humanities & History Librarians, welcome to Butler Library! We all look forward to this time of year, when we welcome and introduce our university community to the extensive resources available in the Libraries. Here are some of our upcoming events and orientation sessions.

“Getting Your Bearings” for Graduate Students

If you’re a graduate student, you may wish to attend one of our “Getting Your Bearings” orientations, designed to help you begin using the powerful information tools at your disposal and to point you to some of the most important library services and personnel at Butler Library and elsewhere on campus.

The Libraries will be offering six “Getting Your Bearings” sessions to introduce graduate researchers to our collections and services.

The sessions begin with a 45 minute tour of key points and services in Butler Library, including an intro to our Rare Book & Manuscript library. This is likely to be of most interest and relevance to people working in the humanities, history, and social sciences. The tours will begin in the Butler Lobby, just inside the entrance.
Thursday, September 1 — 11:30-1:00
Thursday, September 1, 4:30-6:00 (NOTE: Part 2 meets in Butler Room 203)
Friday, September 2, 10:00-11:30
Friday, September 2, 12:00-1:30
Tuesday, September 6, 1:00-2:30
Wednesday, September 7, 1:00-2:30

The second half of the session, which will take place in Butler 306, will be devoted to an overview of the Libraries’ online information system and ways to get the most out of it, and would be of value to all graduate students. Participants who want to attend only the second half should feel free to come directly to Butler 306 about 45 minutes after the beginning of the tour.